SOMEONE slipped this little bomb wrapped up like a present under your Christmas tree: Starting next month, the New York Mercantile Exchange is going to let average investors speculate on the price of oil and gasoline.

No, don’t pooh-pooh this! Pay attention.

This is big news – and not in a good way – even if you personally are smart enough to toss this gift in the trash.

This is a trick. A Trojan horse.

Wall Street wants to keep speculation at a maximum so it can make profits, even if it means you and I will have to pay as much as possible for the gasoline, natural gas and heating oil we are obliged to use until enlightened leadership slips into Washington one of these years and breaks our energy addiction.

The wire service Bloomberg reported right before the holiday that Nymex will begin trading in a weighted energy index “designed to attract small investors.”

Well, lucky for us!

The problem in the energy markets this past year or so hasn’t been that demand outstripped the supply of oil. No, there’s plenty of oil and gasoline and natural gas to go around. In fact, there’s so much that OPEC felt obliged to reduce oil output a few weeks ago.

In years gone by, such a move by the OPEC cartel would have had a devastating impact on the energy markets and prices would have soared.

But not this time. There is so much oil and gasoline available today – and more eventually coming from Third World countries – that even OPEC couldn’t budge prices by much.

As I’ve been saying in this column for the longest time, the problem isn’t with the price of a real barrel of oil. The problem is with the price of a “paper” barrel.

Speculators on Wall Street managed for a while to get the price of a barrel of oil – on paper, at least – to rise to nearly $80. These clowns never actually take possession of an actual barrel of oil. They are merely gambling on where the price of barrels of oil will be in the future.

But their speculation gives retailers of gasoline and heating oil an excuse to raise prices.

To the speculators’ credit, they were doing a marvelous job of making Americans pay too much for fuel.

Sure, the oil companies that sell us gasoline made unconscionable profits. But in fairness to ExxonMobil and even to OPEC, the run-up in prices after the 2005 hurricane season wasn’t their fault. Blame that entirely on speculators.

As anybody with a car knows, the price of fuel has dropped about 25 percent from its peak. That’s where the Nymex’s little bomb in a box comes in.

After having lost a bundle when energy prices fell, the pros are now skittish. And they’d like to get more suckers to help them jack prices up. The speculators need accomplices and, nice as they are, they’d like the regular folks who are paying the higher energy prices to join in their game.

As they say on Wall Street, the energy markets would like more liquidity. The pros have moved on to other things. Now, they’d like the amateurs to move in.

Why are the pros suddenly getting nervous about their ability to keep energy prices up?

For one thing, news organizations are starting to get a little more savvy about letting speculators plead their case for higher prices.

T. Boone Pickens, the corporate raider who’s now a hedge fund operator on a mission to push oil up to $100 a barrel, barely gets time anymore on TV, although he’s now making the rounds on magazine covers.

But the real problem is with the weather. It’s just been too darn hot in the heavily populated parts of the U.S. this winter, and that has kept a lid on the price of energy.

Even with some storms last week, for the country as a whole, 2006 will have the third-warmest average temperature since records have been kept.

The weather in Central Park is a good indicator of the speculators’ dilemma.

There have been 18 percent fewer heating degree-days than normal this year. That’s the measure of household energy consumption for heating used by the government.

While October was colder than average, November had 27 percent fewer heating degree-days and December so far is 22 percent below average.

All regions of the country have been warmer than average this year.

The Northeast has been 4.4 degrees balmier, the Midwest 1.7 degrees warmer and the upper Midwest 4.2 degrees warmer. The nation as a whole has been 2.1 degrees warmer.

There’s nothing Wall Street can do about the temperature. But if they can get enough small investors to put money into the great energy speculation caper, maybe they can get another run at record prices.